Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 7 p.m.  

Providence United Methodist Church
2810 Providence Road, Charlotte, N.C., 28211

 Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College, Alan Michael Parker is a poet, novelist, professor, raconteur, and squeaky wheel. He writes books. He has written three novels, Cry Uncle, Whale Man, and The Committee on Town Happiness (Dzanc Books, 2014), along with eight collections of poems: Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, A Peal of Sonnets, Elephants & Butterflies, Ten Days (with painter Herb Jackson), Long Division and The Ladder (Tupelo Press, forthcoming in 2015).

 He served as Editor of The Imaginary Poets, and co-editor of two other volumes of scholarship. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Pleiades, and The Yale Review, among other magazines, and in 2011 were anthologized in The Best American Poetry as well as The Pushcart Prize; his prose has appeared in journals including The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker.

 Alan Michael Parker has received numerous awards and fellowships, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Fineline Prize from the Mid-American Review, the 2013 Randall Jarrell Award, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2012 North Carolina Book Award for Long Division; his 2011 novel, Whale Man, was shortlisted for the 2011 ForeWord Reviews's "Book of the Year Award" in the category of Literary Fiction. His essay, "Beach House as Nostalgia Museum," was named a Notable Essay by the editors of the 2013 Best American Essays. He has recently been called "a general beacon of brilliance" by Time Out, New York.

As an undergraduate, Alan was invited to join the graduate poetry workshop at Washington University, where he studied with Donald Finkel, Howard Nemerov, and Mona Van Duyn. As a graduate student in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where he received his M.F.A. in Writing, Alan Michael Parker studied with Carolyn Forché, Richard Howard, Denis Johnson, Stanley Kunitz, William Matthews, and Nobel Laureates Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz. Since 1998, Alan Michael Parker has taught at Davidson College, where he was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 2007; in 2012, he was named Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English. He also teaches in the University of Tampa Low-Residency M.F.A. program, where he works with graduate student writers in both poetry and fiction. Alan Michael Parker lives in Davidson, NC with his wife, the artist Felicia van Bork, whose work is represented by Jerald Melberg Gallery.